Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas declined to say Friday whether he plans to run for president in 2024, instead taking the opportunity to credit President Trump for “changing a lot of Republican orthodoxy” and bringing “millions of new voters into our party.”
The dust has yet to settle from the 2020 presidential race, but the jockeying to be the party’s next standard-bearer is already well underway.
“Let me say this about Donald Trump’s influence on our party: we did not win control of the Senate, we did not gain seats in the House, we did not pick up legislators in spite of Donald Trump,” Mr. Cotton said on Fox News. “We won because of Donald Trump.”
Mr. Cotton is thought to have White House aspirations and be among the Republicans that could fight over the Trump mantle in the 2024 race.
Mr. Cotton said Mr. Trump has remade the GOP by “opposing bad trade deals, by opposing the importation of cheap foreign workers to take our jobs here at home, by standing up to mobs in our streets.”
“That’s the agenda of the Republican Party going forward and anyone who thinks we can go back to the pre-Trump era of bad trade deals and open borders, they are not thinking clearly,” he said.
Mr. Cotton dodged questions about his 2024 plans, saying he is focused on reelecting Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the Georgia runoff races.
“I’d like to put 2020 on the books … before we move onto the next election,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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